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 We all know that most of RPG's take place in our minds, but often a good prop goes a long way to get everyone on the same page - Maps of combat situations, those bloodstained letters your players just found, or even something like the foul looking totem that they have to recover. These things are useful in helping us visualize the setting more. But until now, we never had a thread. This is going to be a bit bare bones for now, but I'll edit it in - this is a place to talk about maps and the like, share yours, talk about how to make your own good quality ones. I'm going to start off with a link to the Cartographers guild forums. - They have a good collection of user made maps, and some tutorials. but I hope that people will supply links to other good tutorials or map/token dumps. I'll try and keep this post updated with the best of them. I myself like to make maps using Photoshop and textured layers. While these are not the most detailed maps, they give me something I can put up when playing (I RP over the internet) to allow people to get their tokens down.  This is a recent example, barebones, but good enough for something that I'll only use for a few hours. The main problem I have is finding good sci-fi maps- as most people seem to be playing fantasy worlds.
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Dec 14, 2014 08:08
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I tried experimenting with something new this week: stamps. Yup, stamps. Behold the fifteen-cent first class stamp from the sovereign nation of Lichstein, featuring current monarch Duke Gebeine, the design last updated during the semiseptcentennial celebrations. Of course he hasn't particularly changed much in the past couple of centuries, so really it's just cosmetic. Maybe he just wanted to show off his new hat.  Here's how the stamp looks in practice, in case you can't make out some of the details in the blank version. The design was... tricky, to say the least. There's a more than a couple of mask layers involved, and several sneaky methods to get the art looking just right. However, the handy part about working with layers is that it makes it easier to create templates. Not a fan of red? Green, blue, even black could all be options with just a few tweaks. Besides doing some small tweaks and trying to get the template working well, there's really only two things I need to work on at this point: first, different shapes and sizes of stamps. I'd like to try doing some oval, triangle, and maybe even octagonal stamps. While the standard square/rectangle is very useful, there's something delightfully esoteric about obtuse shapes. Second I need to figure out what I'm actually going to use these stamps for.
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Dec 14, 2014 09:30
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Here's some maps that have influenced the way I think of game maps: The Bad & Ugly:  Notice that this map doesn't actually do anything. It barely works to describe the continent and it doesn't have any uses. And of course since it's 7th Sea, the shape of the continent and the geography makes no sense at all. The Pretty:  MERP is dated, but I really like this map style. It's informative and easy to read. You got roads, terrain and all kinds of poo poo laid out clearly there. Something Something:  The Eberron maps are very informative and actually worth something as a game resource. Maps should be actual gaming resources, not just lovely illustration pieces. If you can't actually use a map as a map, what is it good for?
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Dec 14, 2014 10:45
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MAN, I feel like it's practically required to bring up Geek Chic in a thread about gaming "stuff". The furniture they sell there isn't actually that badly priced for a custom piece of work that is built to last (particularly the cheaper models) - they also serve as a great starting point for brainstorming low cost solutions to enhance gaming night without dropping five grand on a table. Aside from that, there has been a glut of fantasy coinage such as Campaign Coins. You see them offered primarily as Kickstarter high-tier backer awards or in sets, but I've always entertained having a chest full of them at the table to award people with something tactile if you're playing that kind of game where money is a big thing. On the maps front I recommend the Google+ groups for fantasy mapping and more besides. I get updates from them practically every day. Check out Library of Gaming Maps, Cartographer's Guild, and Map-Making in Games for a lot of work from all skill levels showing what's possible. Dyson Logos and Maxime Plasse, who both have what I consider to be extremely high quality work. Of course, I'd be remiss if I failed to mention Jonathan Roberts, who has done some real solid work in a little book called the World of Ice & Fire: The Untold History of Westeros (Amazon link). Of special note is whoever maintains this blog Tierras Yegimales, who is working on a Spanish-language original campaign worldbook with some absolutely fantastic maps. There's all sorts of other stuff to talk about but I figure the above can help get the ball rolling. Maybe someone can tell me about their sick-nasty custom dice tower that they 3D-printed off of a MakerBot.
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Dec 14, 2014 11:09
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Kemper Boyd posted:And of course since it's 7th Sea, the shape of the continent and the geography makes no sense at all. This is a pet peeve of mine, geography is pretty straightforward and with just a little bit of effort you can get a good understanding of how landmasses, bodies of water, and climates form in the real world and then build believable geography. Also good geography can make great world building and interesting stories. Trade routes, border disputes, cultural migrations, are all influenced by geography, but if your geography is stupid then these things become contrived. I don't think you need to be a slave to real world geography, fantasy worlds should have fantasy terrain, but if you don't have a good reason for something to be out of the ordinary then it should follow the rules that have already been established by the real world. Now time for me to share:  One of the common instructions for *world games is to make maps but to leave blanks, we wanted to do that for Spirit of 77's fictional location "The City". I did it by emulating the the 1970's redesign of the New York Subway map. The interesting thing about the New York Subway map is that it's not geographically accurate, it is only relatively accurate to the subway stations (which confused a lot of people when it was introduced). So it solves our problem of leaving blanks and makes for a really interesting way to look at the city. We were originally going to have these printed poster sized for a backer reward but we didn't reach the necessary stretch goal.
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Dec 14, 2014 11:32
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Peter Fenlon's maps for MERP were amazing, but the level of detail they provide was I think a hindrance to most gamers. It was too much to really use, and at the same time so much of it outside the places established by Tolkien was just "some red house, who the gently caress even knows what it's called." His natural features though, goddamn.
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Dec 14, 2014 11:43
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aldantefax posted:Aside from that, there has been a glut of fantasy coinage such as Campaign Coins. You see them offered primarily as Kickstarter high-tier backer awards or in sets, but I've always entertained having a chest full of them at the table to award people with something tactile if you're playing that kind of game where money is a big thing. Jesus you might as well use Sacagawea dollars for how much they charge for this poo poo.
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Dec 14, 2014 11:50
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aldantefax posted:Of course, I'd be remiss if I failed to mention Jonathan Roberts, who has done some real solid work in a little book called the World of Ice & Fire: The Untold History of Westeros (Amazon link). He also did the maps for the Kobold Press campaign setting Midgard:  zVxTeflon posted:Jesus you might as well use Sacagawea dollars for how much they charge for this poo poo. Do what Baldur's Gate did and use Canadian coins. Lightning Lord fucked around with this message at 12:07 on Dec 14, 2014 |
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Dec 14, 2014 12:04
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Any good maps of keeps?
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Dec 14, 2014 13:46
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Bucnasti posted:This is a pet peeve of mine, geography is pretty straightforward and with just a little bit of effort you can get a good understanding of how landmasses, bodies of water, and climates form in the real world and then build believable geography. Would you mind expanding on this a little? The last geography I had was back in 9th grade, which was a while ago. In particular, what about that 7th sea map makes it look unnatural? The number of thin peninsulas jutting out to the south is weird to me, I guess. Is there like a plate-tectonics reason that can't happen? Something about the distribution of mountains is also screwy?
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Dec 14, 2014 17:21
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ianvincible posted:Would you mind expanding on this a little? The last geography I had was back in 9th grade, which was a while ago. In particular, what about that 7th sea map makes it look unnatural? The number of thin peninsulas jutting out to the south is weird to me, I guess. Is there like a plate-tectonics reason that can't happen? Something about the distribution of mountains is also screwy? Mainly its the mountains - most landmasses run sea level -> mountain in hights, the mountain ranges running up/down on the map are odd, they should be clustered in the centre.
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Dec 14, 2014 17:34
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zVxTeflon posted:Jesus you might as well use Sacagawea dollars for how much they charge for this poo poo. Yeah, well, you could just as easily use cheap plastic pirate coins, get some foreign coins (not that much more expensive), actual collector coins, etc. - the majority of these coin operations use some type of cheaper metal for the feel. You pay the premium mostly for the fact they'll make your fantasy bling go clinky clink.
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Dec 14, 2014 19:41
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Has anyone ever come across any good tutorials for replicating the Harn style of mapping? The colors are a bit dated now, but I've always loved the style since I saw it in Dragon way back when.
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Dec 14, 2014 21:21
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Grey Hunter posted:Mainly its the mountains - most landmasses run sea level -> mountain in hights, the mountain ranges running up/down on the map are odd, they should be clustered in the centre. Yeah 7th Sea is some sort of non-Europe setting right? It's like they threw stuff down to emulate Europe without any regard for why things are the way they are. The Mountains and rivers all conveniently line up to make nice neat national borders, which makes it look super fake. Rivers are the thing that I see that bug me all the time on fantasy maps. Rivers run from high to low ground to the ocean in the shortest possible way, they never go through or over mountain ranges (like it appears they do in that 7th Sea Map). Even if you've got fantasy formed terrain, water works a pretty specific and predictable way and will form itself around the terrain in the same way every single time. Also massive mostly straight rivers that split landmasses down the middle are awful, rivers are never consistent, they go through floods and droughts, they change over time and change the terrain around them. Rivers are massively important to pre-industrial societies, they're the best method of inland trade and transport, wars are fought over river access, culture is exchanged along river paths, cities and even nations are built upon river banks. Throwing them down willy nilly will give your world an artificial feeling every time. ianvincible posted:Would you mind expanding on this a little? The last geography I had was back in 9th grade, which was a while ago. In particular, what about that 7th sea map makes it look unnatural? The number of thin peninsulas jutting out to the south is weird to me, I guess. Is there like a plate-tectonics reason that can't happen? Something about the distribution of mountains is also screwy? Yeah most of us took Geography in high school, but they're mostly concerned about teaching you where countries are located so you can pass standardized tests. A couple years ago I took a college level geography class and there was no mention of countries it was all about how terrain forms and it's effects on climate. Once you understand all the processes involved it's pretty straightforward to predict what types of terrain and climate a specific area of the world will have. We actually did a exercise where we plotted out all the different climates on an arbitrarily shaped continent. I'm no expert but I know enough to not make major mistakes. I would love to see a fantasy world created by a Geography geek in the way that Middle Earth was created by a language geek. Somebody who really knew their stuff could predict amazing details about a world based on the placement geographic features and natural resources alone.
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Dec 14, 2014 21:30
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Grey Hunter posted:Mainly its the mountains - most landmasses run sea level -> mountain in hights, the mountain ranges running up/down on the map are odd, they should be clustered in the centre. This is assuming there are no tectonic plates running into eachother. If there are you also get mountains along coasts and where large landmasses meet. Hence mountains on the western coast of North and South America and the Himalayas.
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Dec 14, 2014 21:58
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ianvincible posted:Would you mind expanding on this a little? The last geography I had was back in 9th grade, which was a while ago. In particular, what about that 7th sea map makes it look unnatural? The number of thin peninsulas jutting out to the south is weird to me, I guess. Is there like a plate-tectonics reason that can't happen? Something about the distribution of mountains is also screwy? Here's my problem with Theah's map: Deserts happen when water can't get to a place. There are deserts in Chile because all the warm, wet air that makes the Amazon the Amazon can't get over the Andes. There are mountains between the Mojave and the Pacific, thus barely any water ever gets there. This is a vast oversimplification and there's a bunch of other elements involved in desertification, but you get what I'm talking about. Now, let's say that those brownish bits in Cathay and the Empire of the Crescent Moon are deserts. That's a bit of an assumption, but all I have to work with are watercolors so I'll take what I can get. Now, that patch of Ussuran land between the mountains and the sea between Cathay and the Empire must be the wettest place in the world, because if any wet air from that sea went anywhere but there or back into the ocean, there wouldn't be deserts there. Cathay is on a penisula. If the winds around Cathay went in any direction but a pure north-south, it wouldn't be a desert. These are the most improbably deserts in the world. Then again, they might not be deserts, in which case it's still the mapmaker's fault for making the map so indistinct that I need to rely on vague watercolors to tell what the terrain's like.
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Dec 14, 2014 22:16
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Plague of Hats posted:Peter Fenlon's maps for MERP were amazing, but the level of detail they provide was I think a hindrance to most gamers. It was too much to really use, and at the same time so much of it outside the places established by Tolkien was just "some red house, who the gently caress even knows what it's called."
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Dec 14, 2014 23:12
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Bucnasti posted:Now time for me to share: This was a brilliant idea on how to do the map.
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Dec 14, 2014 23:53
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I've done a bunch of battle-level maps (most of which are in an imgur album here) but here's a couple town maps: This is the map of Newport I used when I was doing a one-shot for the 6FU crew and wanted things to look good for the video. That map is inspired by the one I used for my normal campaign which is much less fancy:  I kept meaning to replace it with an actually drawn one but the roll20 page with the map on it was so covered in notes and pogs that it felt wrong to switch. Plus the game started spending hardly any time in Glitterhaegen so it was never a priority.
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Dec 15, 2014 05:48
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I personally lean towards form over function in maps: while a degree of realism is necessary for a map to be believable I'd personally rather have a pretty map over a detailed and realistic one. Having said that, I agree that the 7th Sea map is neither pretty nor realistic. To provide an example, I really like the map of the world from the video game Bastion:  The reason I like this map is that it feels like a map someone could've made of the world in-setting. Medieval maps of Europe had limited use as actual navigation tools and were more like works of art showing with words and pictures where places were (more or less) in relation to each other. While the Bastion map isn't quite as cluttered as the maps of Olaus Magnus (my favorite medieval cartographer) it still has that feel of an actual map someone could've made in the world. This is not to say that a detailed and realistic map is a bad thing: if you're running a game where exact distances and the lay of the land matter then maps like the ones of Middle Earth posted here are an amazing resource. I personally just tend to run things like travel and distance more in the abstract and I'd rather have a map be evocative than exact. (Obviously, if I can have both then that's great!)
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Dec 15, 2014 10:48
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Does anybody have any sweet setups that they use to get their gaming on? Geek Chic aside, I'd wager that the Cheeto Cave has its place, but there are other setups out there like this Warhammer Fantasy inspired DIY room that a dude made in Japan. Took him 3 years of spare elbow grease, but drat if that doesn't look like a dope place to play any kind of game. There's also the Ultimate Gaming Table, which is a pretty low cost DIY solution (for the table itself, anyway) that also incorporates some neat features, like a text messaging system that players and the GM can use to pass secret notes and such.
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Dec 15, 2014 21:21
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aldantefax posted:Does anybody have any sweet setups that they use to get their gaming on? Geek Chic aside, I'd wager that the Cheeto Cave has its place, but there are other setups out there like this Warhammer Fantasy inspired DIY room that a dude made in Japan. Took him 3 years of spare elbow grease, but drat if that doesn't look like a dope place to play any kind of game. That looks cool as poo poo and I want it.
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Dec 15, 2014 22:01
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That dude making the greatest gaming room ever for ~$1,500 is a lesson for all nerds. I think. It certainly is a lesson about what my house is going to look like someday. I hear that my old gaming group just replaced their two-big-folding-table setup covered in maps and miniatures and such with ... a huge television screen. Apparently nobody has actually taken a picture of it yet, so it is up to me to find out if it is awesome enough to do so. Edit: Also I think there must be some sort of equation out there to determine precisely how many props makes your gamemastering efforts go from "appreciated and lauded and verisimilitude-enhancing" to "oh god not more props"
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Dec 16, 2014 04:45
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Massive touchscreens as tables has got to be the next cool thing (or maybe the thing after the next cool thing). Are there any games taking advantage of interactive surfaces like tablets yet?
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Dec 16, 2014 09:55
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I once used Pyromancers.net to make maps for Dark Heresy but the thing is pretty unstable and often breaks and outputs map with an unremovable grey filter over everything which is kind of annoying. Here's one that I happened to have saved on my pc in case anybody wants a very washed out control room for a modern/sci fi setting: 
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Dec 31, 2014 20:23
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Lightning Lord posted:Do what Baldur's Gate did and use Canadian coins. Was this the PC version? If so, I never noticed it.
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Jan 1, 2015 20:05
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This seems like a good thread for it. I'm playing a Dungeon World game and I'm planning to split the party this weekend. One group is going to be going with combat. So I don't need anything there. But the other is going to be solving puzzles and riddles so I need some solid puzzles. Preferably with handouts. The people going into the puzzles are the bashy half of the team and they've been rping so this should be interesting.
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Jan 13, 2015 23:17
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Weirdo posted:Was this the PC version? If so, I never noticed it. When you donate gold to temples, the little animation of coins falling into the offering bowl uses loonies and toonies. Some dude's screenshot using that mod that puts BG1 into the BG2 engine but it's still the same: 
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Jan 13, 2015 23:21
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Lightning Lord posted:When you donate gold to temples, the little animation of coins falling into the offering bowl uses loonies and toonies. Neat, I never noticed that.
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Jan 13, 2015 23:22
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Len posted:This seems like a good thread for it. I'm playing a Dungeon World game and I'm planning to split the party this weekend. There's a puzzle in one Dragon magazine from the 3e age I've wanted to use ever since: Basically, it's a corridor, some 30' in width, divided into 5' square plates. Some of the squares are trapped so if you step on them there's a magical zap that deals a lot of damage to anyone stepping on it. The first and last rows of squares are untrapped. When a character steps on a square they hear a chime that lets them know how many adjacent squares are trapped. So, yeah, it's minesweeper D&D style. If you want to add a bit of challenge to it, have a monster wander into the room just as the players are halfway through the room.
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Jan 14, 2015 10:03
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"I cast flight"
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Jan 14, 2015 12:24
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petrol blue posted:"I cast flight" That can be a problem with puzzles as traps, people will find an easy way to negate them. Maybe as an alternative, there as a recessed wall or alcove of buttons/levers/whatever recessed into holes and arranged in a grid. There is no visible door, it's a seamless blend with the wall. Your dwarf types and elf types can be able to tell it's a door, a massively thick one unable to be opened except through the mechanical means. There is only enough room for one person to operate the switches. Chimes let you know how many adjacent switches are trapped, each trapped switch lowers the ceiling by a good amount except for the alcove where the array is. Turning all the non-trapped switches (regardless of the number of trapped ones hit) raises the ceiling and opens the hidden door. Then you can give your player solving the trap a gridded piece of paper and have them fill out which switches they hit, you could do also get a bunch of pennies, mark the trapped ones on the face with a permanent marker and arrange them, maybe mark the others with an indicator of how many nearby there are. Just keep it on a piece of paper and slide it over to the solver when the time comes.
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Jan 14, 2015 21:46
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petrol blue posted:"I cast flight" Stuff like this is why I love my players one of them is using The Mage playbook with hi focus being wind and he's almost always levitating. But he's an rear end in a top hat and would make the other two figure it out on their own and it will be wonderful.
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Jan 14, 2015 21:49
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I was inspired by Perdido Street Station when I made this for a Dungeon World game, but we never ended up getting far enough in it to fill in details for the city.
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Jan 17, 2015 00:10
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Len posted:Stuff like this is why I love my players one of them is using The Mage playbook  I'm playing in our DW campaign, not running it. We have a time mage, and he's responsible for... as he put it this session: "stop complaining, guys, this is the optimal timeline".One time, a character went back in time so she could try to kill and eat her past self.
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Jan 17, 2015 01:05
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Though I am no great cartographer, I love making and using props for table top and internet games. It doesn't matter how gifted a storyteller you are as a GM, no amount of wordsmithing a description will be as powerful as giving the players something tactile that they can hold and examine. Letters, memos, and notes are probably the easiest things to make for this. They help breakdown the wall between the player and the character because the player is physically interacting with the same things their character are. Here are a couple of my favorites from games I've run on here. While not as powerful as handing a player a printout across the table, they work well online too because the little details they contain give the sense that the world the note is coming from really exists even if you as the GM haven't written down novels worth of world building.   Cover sheets for folders accomplish the same thing. Especially when doing a game where the characters are a part of the government, military, or a corporation of some sort because it's a subtle reminder of the bureaucratic minutia attached to even the baddest of bad asses. The best part is that you can just staple them to an envelope or folder and use them again and again. Or, for the most realistic usage, drop them in a powerpoint to brief the characters with.  From time to time I would also create fake newscasts. Obviously these aren't really suited for a table, but they are easy to throw together and give the players a sense that there is more to the world then what they've seen in the game.  Lastly, something that's had great success for me both online and around the table is creating awards for the players. I've run a lot of military themed games so it was easy to rip off a military style medal system to reward the players for in character action. Just print theme off, glue them to some card stock, and award them at the end of a campaign arc. I like these a lot, and made a whole mess of individual ribbons that I could jam together into a rack via gimp or PS. 
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Jan 17, 2015 04:08
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Fuego Fish posted:I tried experimenting with something new this week: stamps. Yup, stamps. I actually looked into creating fake stamps for the best game of De Profundis ever (that I never did get around to starting).
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Jan 17, 2015 16:22
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Bucnasti posted:
Is it possible to get a high res version PDF so I can get my own poster sized map printed? Edit for some real content. I created a set of opening credits for a Buffy game I ran using Flash. Freaked the players out the first time they saw it. I've done US transfer of station military orders (in the proper format!). mocked up newspaper front pages with the character's latest exploits (Victorian superheroes), simulated satellite photography of an alien world, created press releases and produced tons of maps. I love Photoshop and Illustrator. Humbug Scoolbus fucked around with this message at 22:16 on Jan 17, 2015 |
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Jan 17, 2015 21:49
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:Is it possible to get a high res version PDF so I can get my own poster sized map printed? Yeah I can do that. There are still some things I want to fix/finish on it first though.
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Jan 17, 2015 21:58
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Something I'm working on today, I've noticed players making new characters having a lot of questions about BUZZ (character motivations) and Gear. So I made up this reference page, it's done in the style of old newspaper ads.
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Jan 18, 2015 06:11
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